So, this is an interesting question ... I can tell you about my experience and offer a few pieces of advice.
MIT was a great fit for me for several reasons. First of all, I love airplanes and applied that, knowing that I wanted to study Aerospace Engineering.
Secondly, I was able to get recruited to play basketball, which works a little differently at MIT. Basically, all of the student athletes have to go through the same admissions process, so Coach only recruits players with high GPAs and high SAT scores. Being D3, there are no scholarships but plenty of need based financial aid.
Thirdly, I think that I stood out as a pretty well rounded person. Mit gets a lot of applications from very very smart kids who can't write or talk to someone to save their life. To help with that there is an interview process as part of the application process after a kind of first round of selection. This was one of the biggest differences between a place like CalTech and MIT. When I visited CalTech I felt out of place because everyone there was so weird (for lack of a better word), while at MIT people were pretty normal, just happened to be really smart.
Ok, so advice ... First of all, they've got to do well in school. I know IB is intense but they should be shooting for all A's.
From there they've go to have something that sets them apart from all of the other students with good grades and good SAT scores. For me it was basketball and I think Sports are a great way to do it.
So I'd say that if they like basketball and will be able to play varsity ... Stick with it. It's going to take some sacrifice but it's all worth it in the end.
I'd also encourage them to get involved with some type of engineering extracurricular. For me it was radio controlled airplanes, I got into the hobby and started a club in high school. FIRST Robotics is a great high school team based competition that if Robinson doesn't have, it should.
Mu Alpha Theta is also excellent, I enjoyed my 4 years on the team and got to compete nationally, which I'm sure helped my application.
Beyond that I think student government was a great experience for me, so I'd also encourage some type of leadership activity. That could even be something like leading a church group or volunteering.
Ok, I'm now realizing that that's a lot of stuff, haha, so the general piece of advice is to just love school, dive as deep as they can into sports and engineering.
The rest will just flow from that. MIT wants students who do things because they love them, not because they think it's going to get them into a good school ... There is a big difference.
In terms of life at school, it has been an amazing experience for me. I fit into a fraternity right away and have made some deep friendships. The work is hard and there is an adjustment period for everyone, it's just a matter of going from one of the best in high school to middle of the pack (for me) in college and for some people that is too hard.
The basketball team was awesome, I got injured at the end of my sophomore year so I only played 2 years and coached a third, but those relationships made on the team were my strongest and the coach and I still talk regularly. My major was also a ton of fun and has allowed me to do things for work that I just wonder how they pay me to have so much fun, haha.
I got involved with a team called Design/Build/Fly, an international student competition, and pretty much all of my job opportunities have flown from that, plus we got to build planes with other people money!
I was able to be president of my fraternity my senior year, which gave me a ton of leadership experience. I even liked it so much I decided to stay another two years for grad school, haha, but now I'm looking forward to moving out to CA.
Also, while I'm at it, I'll chime in on the Public vs. Private University debate, which I'm sure comes up all the time in the IB program. UF would be free and is a great education, one of the best colleges in the country for many things. MIT costs a lot of money and even with financial aid, I had to take out significant student loans.
Obviously, I'm biased, but I think that the opportunities MIT has given me have been and will be well worth the price of admission. It has opened so many doors for me and given me access to its biggest strength ... its people. The network that I've established, not even really on purpose for most of my time here, is tremendous and will pretty much be the driving force behind my career ... besides a lot of hard work.
I'd love to give you guys a tour some time. I'm moving to San Diego in June, but feel free to email me with more questions, etc... I'd be happy to talk with your boys or even meet up next time I'm in Tampa (don't know when that will be unfortunately).
All the best
Brandon
Happy Times
Berkeley the best of both worlds- Academics and Sports
Monday, February 14, 2011
How I came to love Space Travel
So my son Brandon at MIT once called me on the phone and asked:
"Dad i need to write a paper up here explaining how i fell in love with Space Travel?"
Of course i had to laugh. And then i began to list some events in Brandon's childhood.
1. First when you were little, we used to go to Cocoa Beach for our summer vacations (Holiday on the beach where kids stayed and eat for free...$39 a night)
and to kill time we would visit the Kennedy Space Center with its museum and movies and old space ships and such.
2. One of my favorite movies was 2001 Space Odyssey and we watched it together about 10 or 12 times. It just happened that in that time period movies like The Right Stuff and Armageddon also came out at the movie theater. And of course all the Star Trek and Star War movies. Poor Brandon did NOT have a chance.
3. There was an astronaut that visited Berkeley's lower division and we had a picture of you and this man hanging in your wall. Also hanging on your wall was a BIG picture of the space shuttle taking off.
4. We went once at 3 am to see the Space shuttle take off at 6 am in the morning. The stream of smoke broke up the sun rise and there were more colors in the sky than imaginable. We felt and heard the ROAR of the engines.
5. You built and launched rockets with uncle cookie in science camp for about 3 or 4 years.
6. we even flew those model airplanes with strings attached that you have to go around in a circle.
7. we visited Uncle Mel in Boston and he flew his R/C planes for us. And then i bought you a R/C plane that you built and Uncle Mel flew down here on spring break and taught you how to fly the thing. You two guys were in heaven.
8. we also stopped at Kitty Hawk, NC one time on the way from Florida to DC. And we visited the Wright Brothers museum and saw the plane they flew and the sand dunes they used to launch their plane. You even strapped a BIG kite to your back and flew a little off the sand dune.
9. one of my ex-students took you up in her plane over St Pete, Florida.
10. we went to Lakeland, Florida for the Fly and Fun festival several times. Walked around the many little airplanes there and even saw them make a wing from scratch.
11. we also went to several Air Shows at McDill Airforce Base, here in Tampa.
12. the final blow was the computer simulators that came along in the 1990's.
So you ask, how did you fall in love with air travel ? You had no chance, you were destine for it.
http://mlsuarez.com/rc/index.htm
"Dad i need to write a paper up here explaining how i fell in love with Space Travel?"
Of course i had to laugh. And then i began to list some events in Brandon's childhood.
1. First when you were little, we used to go to Cocoa Beach for our summer vacations (Holiday on the beach where kids stayed and eat for free...$39 a night)
and to kill time we would visit the Kennedy Space Center with its museum and movies and old space ships and such.
2. One of my favorite movies was 2001 Space Odyssey and we watched it together about 10 or 12 times. It just happened that in that time period movies like The Right Stuff and Armageddon also came out at the movie theater. And of course all the Star Trek and Star War movies. Poor Brandon did NOT have a chance.
3. There was an astronaut that visited Berkeley's lower division and we had a picture of you and this man hanging in your wall. Also hanging on your wall was a BIG picture of the space shuttle taking off.
4. We went once at 3 am to see the Space shuttle take off at 6 am in the morning. The stream of smoke broke up the sun rise and there were more colors in the sky than imaginable. We felt and heard the ROAR of the engines.
5. You built and launched rockets with uncle cookie in science camp for about 3 or 4 years.
6. we even flew those model airplanes with strings attached that you have to go around in a circle.
7. we visited Uncle Mel in Boston and he flew his R/C planes for us. And then i bought you a R/C plane that you built and Uncle Mel flew down here on spring break and taught you how to fly the thing. You two guys were in heaven.
8. we also stopped at Kitty Hawk, NC one time on the way from Florida to DC. And we visited the Wright Brothers museum and saw the plane they flew and the sand dunes they used to launch their plane. You even strapped a BIG kite to your back and flew a little off the sand dune.
9. one of my ex-students took you up in her plane over St Pete, Florida.
10. we went to Lakeland, Florida for the Fly and Fun festival several times. Walked around the many little airplanes there and even saw them make a wing from scratch.
11. we also went to several Air Shows at McDill Airforce Base, here in Tampa.
12. the final blow was the computer simulators that came along in the 1990's.
So you ask, how did you fall in love with air travel ? You had no chance, you were destine for it.
http://mlsuarez.com/rc/index.htm
Sunday, February 13, 2011
How to get into MIT
So i was at local Math competition with about 25 local schools and close to 1,000 kids (Berkeley came in second by a few points...we have to get some kids to study the new test on Statistics). In the sponsors lounge while enjoying some coffee and donuts, two different volunteering parents (one from Palm Harbor IB and another from Robinson IB) asked me: "How did your son get into MIT?"
IB stands for International Baccalaureate. It is the public schools attempt to compete with the private schools. They basically get the smartest hardest working top 200 kids in a school of 3,000 students and put them with the smartest hardest working teachers, through a college prep curriculum where they end up in AP Cal, AP Bio, AP English, AP History their senior year. Education beat writer Jay Mathews of the Washington Post loves the IB program. I personally think you can accomplish the same thing with the AP program, but i understand you have to give it a fancy name and called it something different than what they do in the private schools like Tampa Berkeley, Jacksonville Bolles, Orlando Lake Highland and Ft Lauderdale Pinecrest.
So i thought about that question. How did your son get into MIT. First let me start off by saying NO ONE will ever know the REAL reason why anyone gets into any school. Over my 40 years of being in education, i can only say that there are many variables and it differs from school to school, from year to year. Many of the variables are beyond any one's control. Usually there is also luck involved.
I have enough stories to fill a book. Some that i know personally was a nephew who applied to Yale as Chris Mooney and got rejected. Re-applied as Christopher Suarez and got accepted. Another nephew who applied to Georgetown for the International Law program and rejected. Re-applied to the Georgetown for International Studies and got accepted.
There is no doubt that perseverance helps. College want to see and like to read about kids who really want to come to THEIR schools, not just apply to 10 schools.
Even in my son's case, he originally applied for early action at MIT. He had to submit a few more letters before they took him in the regular admissions period.
I also want to add that the college does NOT make or break a person. Most people will be successful in life NO MATTER where they go to school. And in today's world, many claim that graduate school is what really carries the weight in the business world.
Have you ever gone to a doctors office, look at his diploma and walked out because he or she did not go to Duke or John Hopkins ?
I personally was signed to play at Jacksonville University because the Head coach from JU went to the WRONG gym and saw me playing (all told in my book Two Second to Go, blogged here). The first time the coach from JU called my house, i was visiting my brother at Villanova...he thought i was being recruited by Villanova...lol. The second time he called my house, i was at Georgetown University playing pick up ball, he thought i was being recruited by GU...lol
And in the end the only reason i was signed by JU over spring break of my senior year, was because some kid in NY turned them down the night before. By The Way, i ended STARTING on that JU team my FRESHMAN year !! I am so glad i turned down Harvard and Holy Cross and Bucknell and yes, Georgetown University.
I tell my senior girls if they really want to get into UFlorida, just put down you want to study engineering. They only have 20% females in that program, and will knock the door down to get more girls into that program. Of course you have to have the gpa and SAT scores to get in too.
Getting back to my son and how to get into MIT. Like i said before there are many variables.
One was that MIT has just hired a new FEMALE president (beating Harvard to punch AGAIN !!) and she stated that if Stanford and Duke could have academics excellence and good sports too, so could MIT (by the way Harvard's football team went undefeated the year before). So she instructed the admissions committee to give us much weight to captains of sports teams as to class president or school newspaper editor. I notice that first year that many of the best players at MIT were freshman. It was one of the best sports years for MIT. In basketball, they eventually won 20 games for the first time in the school's 100 year history of playing basketball. And the following year they went to the D3 NCAA tournament for the first time in the school's history.
The fact that my son was 6'5" and played 4 years of varsity basketball and was captain his senior year helped. Plus they won three district titles. He also played football his freshman year and ran track his senior year.
Second my son had straight A's at a very prestigious high school. But not too many students from his high school get into MIT. And some who do get in, do not end up going to MIT because they do not give scholarships like Harvard or State schools.
He took several AP courses, including AP Calculus, AP Bio, AP Physics, AP Chemistry.
He was also elected into student government by his the student body.
He started the R/C club and learned how to fly RC planes. Which was very important later on in his studies at MIT. He ended up winning a national R/C competition while at MIT.
Even with all that and very high SAT scores, he was still deferred at MIT.
Cal Tech in California offered him a $100,000 Presidential scholarship. UFlorida offered him a full ride including spending money every month.
It also helped that we had several Berkeley alums who were very successful at MIT. Evan Pruitt played soccer for MIT. Lee Murfee, PhD also played soccer for MIT. Everet Redmond, PhD majored in nuclear engineering. So Berkeley Prep had a good school rep. My bother Mel earned his Masters degree at MIT and still had many connections with several professors there. I also had some friends on the faculty and they kept encouraging me and my son to keep writing letters to the admissions committee. You never know we will put one candidate over the top.
Brandon wrote about his experience with seeing the Space Shuttle take off in Florida and wanting to be involved in travel to MARS. He also wrote about dealing with his mom getting breast cancer and having to fight to stay alive. I wrote about Brandon babysitting at age 14, which was very unusual for a boy. And working at age 15.
Brandon also spent two weeks of his summer vacation at an orphanage in the Dominican Republic.
And then we got lucky. The best student with the highest SAT scores, decided NOT to go to MIT, but enrolled in Harvard instead. Harvard gave him a full ride.
So now we had to get a college loan for $120,000 to help pay for expenses even after he was awarded a $60,000 financial package.
Was it worth it ? You dam right it was. While his fellow high school classmates came home to live with their parents because of the terrible job market (only 15% of his high school graduating class of 2005 got a job out of college in 2009...remember the depression of 2008 and 2009) Brandon got 6 job offers from the leading engineering companies in the country.
He patented his first RC plane in 2010 and show it off to the TOP Brass at the Pentagon.
Oh did i mention i was born in Cuba, so that makes Brandon a first generation American. We have the Kennedies to thank for that little added mind set in Boston.
IB stands for International Baccalaureate. It is the public schools attempt to compete with the private schools. They basically get the smartest hardest working top 200 kids in a school of 3,000 students and put them with the smartest hardest working teachers, through a college prep curriculum where they end up in AP Cal, AP Bio, AP English, AP History their senior year. Education beat writer Jay Mathews of the Washington Post loves the IB program. I personally think you can accomplish the same thing with the AP program, but i understand you have to give it a fancy name and called it something different than what they do in the private schools like Tampa Berkeley, Jacksonville Bolles, Orlando Lake Highland and Ft Lauderdale Pinecrest.
So i thought about that question. How did your son get into MIT. First let me start off by saying NO ONE will ever know the REAL reason why anyone gets into any school. Over my 40 years of being in education, i can only say that there are many variables and it differs from school to school, from year to year. Many of the variables are beyond any one's control. Usually there is also luck involved.
I have enough stories to fill a book. Some that i know personally was a nephew who applied to Yale as Chris Mooney and got rejected. Re-applied as Christopher Suarez and got accepted. Another nephew who applied to Georgetown for the International Law program and rejected. Re-applied to the Georgetown for International Studies and got accepted.
There is no doubt that perseverance helps. College want to see and like to read about kids who really want to come to THEIR schools, not just apply to 10 schools.
Even in my son's case, he originally applied for early action at MIT. He had to submit a few more letters before they took him in the regular admissions period.
I also want to add that the college does NOT make or break a person. Most people will be successful in life NO MATTER where they go to school. And in today's world, many claim that graduate school is what really carries the weight in the business world.
Have you ever gone to a doctors office, look at his diploma and walked out because he or she did not go to Duke or John Hopkins ?
I personally was signed to play at Jacksonville University because the Head coach from JU went to the WRONG gym and saw me playing (all told in my book Two Second to Go, blogged here). The first time the coach from JU called my house, i was visiting my brother at Villanova...he thought i was being recruited by Villanova...lol. The second time he called my house, i was at Georgetown University playing pick up ball, he thought i was being recruited by GU...lol
And in the end the only reason i was signed by JU over spring break of my senior year, was because some kid in NY turned them down the night before. By The Way, i ended STARTING on that JU team my FRESHMAN year !! I am so glad i turned down Harvard and Holy Cross and Bucknell and yes, Georgetown University.
I tell my senior girls if they really want to get into UFlorida, just put down you want to study engineering. They only have 20% females in that program, and will knock the door down to get more girls into that program. Of course you have to have the gpa and SAT scores to get in too.
Getting back to my son and how to get into MIT. Like i said before there are many variables.
One was that MIT has just hired a new FEMALE president (beating Harvard to punch AGAIN !!) and she stated that if Stanford and Duke could have academics excellence and good sports too, so could MIT (by the way Harvard's football team went undefeated the year before). So she instructed the admissions committee to give us much weight to captains of sports teams as to class president or school newspaper editor. I notice that first year that many of the best players at MIT were freshman. It was one of the best sports years for MIT. In basketball, they eventually won 20 games for the first time in the school's 100 year history of playing basketball. And the following year they went to the D3 NCAA tournament for the first time in the school's history.
The fact that my son was 6'5" and played 4 years of varsity basketball and was captain his senior year helped. Plus they won three district titles. He also played football his freshman year and ran track his senior year.
Second my son had straight A's at a very prestigious high school. But not too many students from his high school get into MIT. And some who do get in, do not end up going to MIT because they do not give scholarships like Harvard or State schools.
He took several AP courses, including AP Calculus, AP Bio, AP Physics, AP Chemistry.
He was also elected into student government by his the student body.
He started the R/C club and learned how to fly RC planes. Which was very important later on in his studies at MIT. He ended up winning a national R/C competition while at MIT.
Even with all that and very high SAT scores, he was still deferred at MIT.
Cal Tech in California offered him a $100,000 Presidential scholarship. UFlorida offered him a full ride including spending money every month.
It also helped that we had several Berkeley alums who were very successful at MIT. Evan Pruitt played soccer for MIT. Lee Murfee, PhD also played soccer for MIT. Everet Redmond, PhD majored in nuclear engineering. So Berkeley Prep had a good school rep. My bother Mel earned his Masters degree at MIT and still had many connections with several professors there. I also had some friends on the faculty and they kept encouraging me and my son to keep writing letters to the admissions committee. You never know we will put one candidate over the top.
Brandon wrote about his experience with seeing the Space Shuttle take off in Florida and wanting to be involved in travel to MARS. He also wrote about dealing with his mom getting breast cancer and having to fight to stay alive. I wrote about Brandon babysitting at age 14, which was very unusual for a boy. And working at age 15.
Brandon also spent two weeks of his summer vacation at an orphanage in the Dominican Republic.
And then we got lucky. The best student with the highest SAT scores, decided NOT to go to MIT, but enrolled in Harvard instead. Harvard gave him a full ride.
So now we had to get a college loan for $120,000 to help pay for expenses even after he was awarded a $60,000 financial package.
Was it worth it ? You dam right it was. While his fellow high school classmates came home to live with their parents because of the terrible job market (only 15% of his high school graduating class of 2005 got a job out of college in 2009...remember the depression of 2008 and 2009) Brandon got 6 job offers from the leading engineering companies in the country.
He patented his first RC plane in 2010 and show it off to the TOP Brass at the Pentagon.
Oh did i mention i was born in Cuba, so that makes Brandon a first generation American. We have the Kennedies to thank for that little added mind set in Boston.
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